• funded by NIH
• 1969 started at Princeton by Bob Langridge
• 1976 moved to UCSF
• 1994 Bob retired, Tom Ferrin took over
• now folded into the Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization, and Informatics (RBVI)

Software evolution:

MIDS → Midas, MidasPlus (80's and 90's) → UCSF Chimera (late 90's to present)

Hardware evolution changed how the lab serves the community:

expensive facilities, people visit us → everyone has their own graphics, we distribute software (first by mailing tapes, now by providing downloads)

• early prototypes: millions of dollars
• Evans & Sutherland systems: hundreds of thousands
• Silicon Graphics workstations: tens of thousands
• now everyone uses their own desktop and laptop machines (Mac, PC, Linux)

Not shown are similarly dramatic increases in power and rendering capabilities.

A pop culture contribution: the DNA molecular graphics in “Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan” (1982)

• Robert Langridge in Star Trek Wiki

In 2018, Bob Langridge, Peter Kollman, and Tack Kuntz were jointly awarded the UCSF Medal (video).

Images from Evans & Sutherland PS2 (~80's) – vector graphics as opposed to today's raster, row-based approach:

DNA “rose window” image:

Evans & Sutherland LDS1 (~70's):

Illustrates the old, painful way of putting molecular graphics images into a presentation (used into the 90's): camera, tripod, turning out the lights, multiple exposures of each image, getting slides developed, inserting them into a carousel!

Some of the images above were taken from the slide show associated with a 2002 interview of Bob Langridge by Russ Altman.